To the amazement and delight of all right-thinking people, the industrial rush for the stars I wrote about last week is not an elaborate hoax but an actual hard-headed business proposition — or least, as hard-headed as a business proposition can be when James Cameron is involved. Reuters, Bloomberg and the New York Times all report this morning that Planetary Resources plans to launch a telescopic prospector in the next two years to look for lucrative asteroids and begin mining gold, platinum, aluminium and other valuable materials sometime thereafter.

Obviously, the proof of the asteroid mining company is in the mined asteroids, and retired University of Arizona professor of planetary science John S. Lewis says this is the fifth or sixth time the idea has been proposed, but the backgrounds of the people involved in Planetary Resources suggest they’ve got a reasonable shot at achieving their extraterrestrial ambitions, or at least not running out of capital anytime soon. In addition to Cameron and Ross Perot, they include:

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